The syntax of voice in Russian

Abstract

It is argued here that the syntactic relations between active, passive, and ‘middle’ sentences in Russian cannot be stated in their most general form as long as the grammar of Russian contains a Passive transformation. We propose a theory that defines Voice as the relationship between a verb's subcategorization feature and the surface form of the sentence in which it occurs. This relationship may be optionally expressed by a Voice morpheme on the verb. Languages differ in the number and function of the Voice morphemes they employ: but Russian, we argue, contains only one such morpheme, and its occurrence signals a marked realization of a verb's subcategorization feature.

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